With only 100 delegates chosen from 33 countries, local Andrea Soesbergen was one of four Canadians selected to embark on the Youth Ag-Summit in Australia, an effort intended to address the importance of food security.
A four-day event, the Youth Ag-Summit in Canberra, Australia began on August 24th, welcoming only a limited number of delegates to participate in the annual conference. Welcoming youths ranging from 18 to 25 years of age, the Youth Ag-Summit selected 20-year-old Andrea’s Soesbergen’s entry essay out of nearly 2,000 entries from 87 countries.
Dundee native Andrea Soesbergen’s essay on the importance on food security earned her a position in the Summit, which welcomed youths from both agricultural and non-agricultural backgrounds. The essay asked participants to address not only the problem of food security, but to propose potential solutions. Soesbergen, who is currently working towards a Bachelor degree in Agro-Environmental Sciences at McGill University, feels that food insecurity is a vital concern to our growing population. According to Unicef, the world’s population is expected to increase from 7 billion to 9.6 million by the year 2050. This population spurt is alarming, especially considering the amount of people going to bed hungry every night. What is more shocking is that the world is currently losing anywhere from a quarter to a third of its total food consumption to waste or loss every year.
The Summit believes in engaging the youth of today, hoping to implant in them a concern for the planet’s current level of food security. “We must find new ways to sustainably increase agricultural productivity,” reads the Summit’s website. Young, focused individuals like Soesbergen are ideal candidates in which to promote this kind of global awareness, especially given her knowledge of agriculture. One of the aims of the Summit was to create the Youth Ag Declaration, which proposes solutions that will be presented to the UN in October by two of the delegates.
The experience didn’t come without homework. All of the delegates were given a mandate—upon their arrival home, they must do “three little things” (discussed at the Summit) to improve the food security in their respective communities. “The idea is that if all 100 delegates each complete their three little things, that will be 300 positive actions that have been made all over the world, and that is something that is quite impressive,” said Soesbergen.
Soesbergen had this to say about the entire experience. “I think that the most important thing that I learned during the summit was the importance of leadership. Some of the themes we chose as being of particular importance were education, communicating about the value of agriculture, research and development into new production systems and sustainable and responsible consumption. However, throughout the summit it became clear to me that without leadership, without people making things happen, the solutions that need to be moved forward won’t. It takes people to inspire others, to encourage people to take action. That is how we create change.”
